This confuses them because they see a priest, but feel something is off. The thought of a feminine man is awkward to our society, and Erdrich uses this to blur the border between man and woman. Father Damien is a woman, yet he is a priest. Catholicism does not allow woman to be priests. When Father Wekkle he is oddly attracted to him, and only after discovering that he was a woman did he understand his attraction. Upon learning that Agnes will not leave with him, he calls her actions sacrilegious. She says, "No, I am nothing but a priest" (207). Erdrich blurs the border by calling Agnes nothing, not man not woman, she is just a priest. The Ojibwe, on the other hand, saw nothing wrong with a woman priest. Their culture accepted the crossing of genders. When meeting Father Damien, Kapshaw remembers "Wishkob, the Sweet, who had seduced many other men and finally joined the family of a great war chief as a wife, where he lived until old, well loved, as one of the women. Kapshaw himself had addressed Wishkob as grandmother" (64). There was the bwaanug who raced the Frenchman who was "a woman-man called a winkte by the Bwaanag" (153). The Ojibwe saw masculinity in a woman as desirable. Mashkiigikwe was one of Kapshaw's wives, and is hunting when Father Damien meets her. She was very masculine, "Mashkiigikwe's legs were like oak fence posts and her neck, solid, was packed with a power that surged up through her body and flashed from her eyes" (92). When Nanapush confronts Father Damien about being a woman, it is not because he feels it is important to him, it is because he knows that it will distract her from their chess game, "Something struck Agnes, then, and she realized that this moment so shattering to her, wasn't of like importance to Nanapush. In Fact, she began to suspect Nanapush had brought it up on purpose to unnerve and distract her" (232). The Objiwe had much different gender borders than that of the society that Father Damien came from.
